DISPOSSESSION - official Collateral Event of the 56. la Biennale di Venezia

Organised by the 2016 European Capital of Culture – Wrocław – Dispossession takes as its departure point the city’s postwar history of displacements. The exhibition is guided by the recognition of a universal and atemporal dimension of dispossession in its psychological and material manifestations. It is within this condition of disorientation and searching for a sense of belonging that we analyse a multi-layered relationship between space and identity.

The historical axis of displacements – Lviv-Wroclaw-Dresden – sketched out here outlines the exhibition’s field of research and thinking about contemporary migration in the context of losing and seeking a home. The acknowledgement that processes of dispossession are lasting and remain present today permeates this exhibition and informs its insistence on seeking a thread that binds seemingly incongruent experiences together.

Dispossession does not mean only depriving somebody of their property, but also pertains to an expulsion of evil spirits, an exorcism that is meant to oust unwanted energies. Taking as their departure point a memory of a home, works by artists from Germany, Poland and Ukraine construct a multi-layered and complex narrative. A focus on reminiscence and oral history intertwines here with the factual data and contemporaneously documented events. From weaving together past and present, imagined and registered, an image emerges here of a home that is phantasmagoric, precariously balancing between reality and absence.